Emi teaches in a Romanian school. At the end of an exhausting day, she and her partner, Eugen, have an unbridled AND filmed sex session. Long story short: the video is being picked up on various porn sites against the couple’s wishes. So here is the young woman facing an inquisition tribunal… sorry, a committee of relatives and colleagues responsible for deciding her fate. Written and directed by Radu Jude, the satirical comedy Bad fuck or porn barjo is, that’s the word, enjoyable.
Winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin and candidate of Romania in the Oscar race for best international film, this cinematic firebrand is equal parts laughter and cringe. It must be said that the action is not confined to the school where Emi will undergo neither more nor less than a lawsuit during which her private life is exploited in order to discredit her professional life.
The film is divided into three chapters. The first opens with video – warning! – explicit of lovers in full naughty frolics. In the course of Emi’s subsequent races in the streets of Bucharest, moments arise when the central theme of sexism dies. We think, for example, of this motorist parked on the sidewalk who insults the protagonist using filthy misogynistic terminology or, more subtly, the filmmaker’s choice to linger, while Emi buys a truck for his daughter, on a barbie-style doll all in pink surrounded and flanked by a baby doll.
We are also witness to snatches of conversations betraying a certain ambient historical revisionism.
Mirror of horror
Revisionism that the filmmaker slays in the second chapter by means of audiovisual archives and eloquent photographs. Everything goes there, from racism to the dictatorship and its victims through the ages, including the power granted to the Romanian Orthodox Church. To the celebration of supposedly cherished traditions, like this folk dance dressed up in social distancing fashion, Jude contrasts the image of a child covered in bruises to illustrate the word “family”. This clip is accompanied by a statistic claiming that 6 out of 10 Romanian children are victims of violence within their family.
It is also in this section that the myth of Breakthrough is summoned, who succeeded in beheading Medusa without being petrified by using the reflection of his shield. Humans cannot face horror without being petrified, argues Radu Jude. The cinema then becomes like the reflective surface of the shield, sending back a reflection of benign but eloquent horror. The film, behind its dark humor and satirical outbursts, subscribes to this analogy.
In fact, the author’s conviction is such that he tends to support the message by giving in to redundancy.
Radu Jude keeps the famous meeting, a social microcosm, for the third chapter. We then witness a marked aesthetic turn (pink and green lights), the film ogling more and more towards a kind of tinkered surrealism. The idea is convincing, but the execution is less.
Full load
However, the content of the interventions of outraged parents (and grandparents) highlights a plethora of prejudices, biases and narrow values. The conservative vision of manners is especially in the crosshairs of Radu Jude, who denounces the hypocrisy of the proponents (and tenants) of a facade puritanism eager to drive out this woman who refuses to ask forgiveness for kissing, for having pleasure to do it and, oh scandal, to film oneself on occasion (the leak is accidental).
Jude, through his charge at full speed, shows a causal link between this tendency to prudishness towards Emi and a machismo well anchored after centuries of patriarchy.
The Inquisition was immediately mentioned: obviously, the august Catholic organization responsible for discovering, torturing and executing witches was present in the reflection of the filmmaker, who places his heroine in front of an entity that has now and already decided on his guilt. Truly ?
Despite a heartbreaking observation made with both visual and comic verve, Radu Jude refuses to give in to pessimism in view of his conclusion broken down into three alternative endings. What about Eugen in all of this? The fact that he was not attacked in this way speaks volumes.